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Is it better to choose ALTERA or XILINX for FPGA ? How to choose FPGA to avoid mistakes, Today we’ll take a look what we need to do when choosing FPGA.
Project requirements
Different projects require different selection principles. Conventional projects can be divided into the following categories.
1.Projects that need to make money as soon as possible to dominate the market
• The first type of project needs to make money as soon as possible to dominate the market. This type of project needs to meet the requirements of low cost and high efficiency, easy to start and develop, and also cheap.
• ALTERA and the low-cost series in xilinx can meet this situation. Although these two major brands have been acquired, their combined market share in FPGAs was as high as 80%!!! You can imagine its widespread use.
2.Projects that urgently need to be upgraded and to avoid elimination
• The other category is projects that urgently need to be upgraded and iterated to avoid being eliminated ，I really recommend you to choose higher performance products from existing brands.
• avoid some design risks caused by the large gap between the learning software and the chip structure. it may be necessary to find some anti-fuses. FPGA, such as Actel's FPGA, .unless the product requires higher intensity confidentiality protection.
3.Special needs projects
• The last type of project is for special scenarios, such as industrial equipment working in extreme environments, or aerospace and aviation ships.
• Then you can choose products suitable for XILINX u, or FPGAs from Actel and Raytheon. When choosing such products, you need to pay attention to the difficulty of purchasing components and whether they can be continuously obtained.
Functional Requirements
And different applications also have different functional requirements.
FPGA usually has the following uses：
• high speed transmission
• Digital circuit functions
• Data stream processing
• signal processing
• Image Processing
• Audio and video codec
When choosing an FPGA based on the above different application functions, you need to pay attention to whether the model has support for these functions, if you need to process data streams efficiently, you need to pay attention to whether the clock frequency is high enough to achieve the expected computing speed.
FPGA resources
According to the FPGA function, the resource consumption that needs to be roughly estimated is as follows:
Such as LUT, PLL, BRAM, DSP and GT high-speed transceiver and other resource consumption. logical resource blocks have different names in different devices , but their essence is similar.
You can check the structure table of the components to see the arrangement of resources.
cost analysis
After we select an FPGA, its cost and market assessment are also necessary. Whether the components are continuously supplied, lack of inventory should be avoided, and whether the price is relatively stable.
